Heaps of Data with Error Coding

I tried a technique this weekend called Error Coding that is elaborated on in The Formative Assessment Action Plan. Below, I included an example of Error Coding that Fisher and Frey use in their power point.  Though the errors being coded for are not the same as mine, you can get a quick overview from looking over the chart.
 

For the last several years, I have had students conduct an interview of another student in the class and then create a birthday card for him/her.  This year I added a step; in between the interview and the card, I had them write a paragraph about the person they interviewed using the info they gleaned through the interview.  They needed to look for patterns and info that would belong together, and then construct a paragraph with that info.  They were told that their paragraph should not contain most of the info gathered because it would more than likely not all fit with the topic sentence.  I created this assignment in order to see how adept my students were at synthesizing evidence, creating a claim, supporting the claim with evidence, and weaving their sentences together logically.  Furthermore, I also wanted to gather information about what grammatical skills they demonstrate with proficiency and which skills need to be revisited.  After collecting the one paragraph responses, I sat down and commenced with the Error Coding. 

To my surprise, the students (at least the class I have already looked over) by and large do not struggle with any of the grammar concepts that I was coding for: commas, subject verb agreement, and parallelism.  Though a few students made these errors, most students exhibited strong grammatical control.  However, what I noticed right away is that far too many paragraphs were too safe.  The reason there were no errors might have been because most students did not take risks in their writing.  There was nary a semi-colon, colon, or hyphen to be seen; in fact, there were very few commas.  While some students used compound and complex sentences, many (probably a majority) only had simple sentences with a compound subject or predicate.  In terms of informing my instruction, this realization is huge.  Rather than giving them rules and practice sentences where they fix the error, these students need exposure to strong writing and varied, complex sentences, which should hopefully make them feel safer as they take writing risks.

Also, I realized a few other things.  I need more practice.  At a few points in my collection, I read a sentence that I didn't know what to do with.  It was definitely wrong, but I didn't know how to classify it.  What exactly did the student need help with?  Where should I start? 

But last & not least he favorite colors purple & favors the company Yamaha. 

The student uses a transition to signal that this is the end of the paragraph, which is good, but I am still not sure where to start on the rest of it.  I may show him the sentence that he wrote and see if he knows what about it might cause confusion on the part of the reader to see if he can give me any more input to help inform my initial instruction with him.

I also came across a few students with some additional grammatical errors that I was not tracking, like prepositional errors and homonym errors that I need to revisit through individual instruction.  

In terms of synthesizing evidence, creating a claim, supporting the claim with evidence, and weaving their sentences together logically, we have a lot of work to do.

All in all, this process took a short amount of time.  In fact, I graded the period while I was waiting for my husband to get out of his doctor's appointment.  I probably could have finished at least two periods; however, I knew the lady at the front desk and spent at least half the time talking to her.  I feel like I gathered a substantial amount of data about my students and their skills that will help to inform my whole class, small group, and individual instruction.